Racism getting replayed

I know this is the month to celebrate black history, but I can't help but wonder if that is not like being asked to dance on your own grave.

There, I said it, and I am already regretting it. I hear Pink Floyd saying, "The lunatic is in my head." I guess it could be true. What's in my head might not be the reality in front of me, and I ought to accept it. I ought to just let them rearrange me until I am sane.

That is what I should let them do, but my head is filled with dark foreboding. Down at the University of Mississippi, James Meredith, the first black student to enroll at that institution, is still under attack. A noose was placed around the neck of a bronze image of him on the campus last week. A flag carrying the Confederate battle emblem was left behind.

In 1962, it took 500 U.S marshals, backed by the 70th Army Engineer Combat Battalion from Fort Campbell, the 2nd Infantry Division from Fort Benning, and the 503rd Military Police Battalion to aid Mr. Meredith in exercising his right of admission, an admission that started a riot, a riot that led to two people, including a journalist, being killed, and 160 U.S marshals and 40 soldiers and guardsman being injured.

That bloody beginning is why I shouldn't get alarmed at the symbolic lynching of a bronze statue. At least that would seem to be what university chancellor Daniel W. Jones is suggesting.

"If you look at how we behave and perform in most ways, we look more like other universities than we have in the past," he said. "That being said, you can't erase the reality that the integration of this university was done in a more violent way than at other universities in the country."

Well, I see them raising the blade over my neck. I hear Ted Nugent, an old rocker, calling our black president a "subhuman mongrel," a term Wolf Blitzer noted was used by Nazi Julius Streicher during World War II to justify genocide of the Jewish people.

But they tell me the blade won't fall because, according to S.H. Blannelberry, one of Nugent's defenders, subhuman mongrel is now an entertaining rather than a dehumanizing term.

"Remember, Nugent is a performer first and foremost," this defender said.

"That's what he does best. And in the political arena, with the cameras rolling and the lights on, he's going to put on a show. He's going to be outrageous. He's going to use words and phrases that purposely rattle the cages of liberals and progressives."

The world I am in is trying to shut me out, and I am shouting my objections but no one seems to hear, not the highest court in the land, which last year gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by eliminating its central component, a provision requiring "nine states, mostly in the South, not to change their election laws without advance federal approval."

"Our country has changed," Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority in that decision.

"While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions."

Yet, less than 48 hours after that vote, Think Progress reported "six of the nine states that had been covered in their entirety under the law's 'preclearance' formula have already taken steps toward restricting voting."

Now, if you stop me in the street and say, "Brother, how far you've come. You have your civil rights victories and you have one of your own in the White House," I will give you what you want. I will say with a maniacal laugh, "I can't think of anything to say except…I think it's marvelous!"